Friends don't let friends...

Apparently, the primary concern of a friend is to keep his friends
from doing the wrong things (sometimes known as "falling into
error"). This seems to be a deeprooted duty in our culture; a Google
search for the phrase "friends don't let friends" returns over
21,000 hits. Many of these are bound to be duplicates, but that
still leaves a lot of things to keep friendwatchers busy.

The range of things to watch out for covers just about everything,
from the sublime to the ridiculous, profound to silly, serious to
whimsical. Here's a collection of Web sites dealing with this
crucial issue.

I don't know when the term originated, but I suspect that "...drive
drunk" is one of the earliest.

Almost all of these sayings are epigrammatic, and many make their
way onto bumper stickers and Tshirts. I sometimes wonder about the
advisability or propriety of proclaiming your views,
sandwichboardlike, on your clothes. Did Jefferson have a Tshirt
that said "I am a Jeffersonian Democrat"?

To save space, I've left out the string "friends don't let friends"
in the links below. When you read them, be sure to add
the "don't" back in, otherwise, you're likely to end up doing all
sorts of wrong things. This will probably get you a lot of
attention, not necessarily appreciated, from your friends.

Also, a few headlines appear in more than one category.

Disclaimer: Inclusion of sites in this list does not imply either my
endorsement or disapproval.

There are a lot of links here. That is, after all, the point. Some of them are bound to be so fascinating that you're
likely to wander off, and may end up gone for days. That is, after all, the point of the Web.

The List

Many sites deal with computers, and what you should or shouldn't use.
Some of them are pretty esoteric.
When there are many sites with the same philosophy, the number of sites is in parentheses after the title.

Does anybody type on a noncomputer keyboard these days?
These sites promote the Dvorak
keyboard, but there's a recent
article (reported on Slashdot) that tells how
Peter Klausler found an even better layout, using a neural
network algorithm and a few million words of online text.

There's a major article in Fortune
about the dark side of PowerPoint. And here's
one from ZDNet News, about the Pentagon's take on
"a growing electronic menace: the PowerPoint briefing".
Here's a great example of PowerPoint run amok: the
Gettysburg Address, if Lincoln had had our advantages.

Those two seem to have the bases covered. Nobody seems interested in keeping their
friends from voting Libertarian or Independent.
Like the Ford/Chevy split, Democrats seem to be more outspoken than Republicans.

On the serious side, there are the friends who don't want their
friends to hurt anyone:

(Notice the TM symbol. He's a lawyer. Say no more.)
This guy does not advocate drunk driving. But, the
consequences can be quite harsh, and as there are always
borderline cases, he maintains that if you do go there,
you'll need the best defense money can buy. Either way,
it's going to cost you a bundle.

Then there are the odd ones, some serious, some not, that just don't
fit into the broad categories:

Notes

I found this in a signature
line on a message board posting. It is attributed to Kevin
Harris.
su is the Unix command that gives you full control
over a computer. Once you successfully su, it and
all its files are yours. If you're drunk, you might
suffer a momentary lapse of judgement, and delete all the
files. I'm told that this happens, but rarely.
The (1) indicates the section of the Reference Manual that
describes su, and it's probably unnecessary, as
su only appears in one section. The (1) does make it
clear that we're talking about Unix.

Reveal codes are little formatting codes used by most word
processors to specify how a document is formatted: paragraph
breaks, lists, numbered sections, etc. Word thoughtfully hides
these from you, which can be annoying at times. If you're
revising a long, complicated document, it's a lot easier if you
can see the codes on the screen. That entry is by a lawyer,
which is interesting because there was once a very good word
processing program, XyWrite
(this was in the Old Days, when companies other than Microsoft
were allowed to write applications). It was much used by the
legal profession, and one of the function keys let you toggle
the reveal codes on and off.